Author: Erica Ezeifedi

I came across this soup when I started watching a Christmas food from around the World Series. I love soup and this one sounds delicious. Here’s another recipe if you’re like me and like to compare different recipes when trying something new.

It’s 1990 in Colombo, Sri Lanka, and Maali Almeida is a photographer and a closeted gay man. He’s also just woken up in a celestial visa office and found out he’s dead. His body is dismembered and sitting in Beira Lake, and if he’s to find out who among the country’s many death squads and goons killed him, he’ll have to do so before the seventh moon.

Ray wants to make a life out of playing classical music on his inherited violin, despite his mother’s “advice” to get a “real” job and the racism he experiences within the world of classical music. As he looks forward to performing in the Tchaikovsky Competition, his violin — which he discovers is an ultra rare Stradivarius — gets stolen. He knows he will get it back, but first he’ll have to wade through claims of ownership of the violin coming from his family as well as the family who enslaved his great-grandfather.

The title of this surprise breakout had everyone and their mom (ha) gagging this year, and for good reason: McCurdy recounts her experiences as a child star, revealing some truly terrible details from her childhood. She describes eating disorders, addiction, child abuse, toxic relationships, and a lot more, all with an endearingly sharp sense of humor.

Okay, so I thought the women in my family could keep a secret, but Byron and Benny’s mom Eleanor really takes the cake (lol). The inheritance she leaves behind consists of a black cake and a recording that tells the story of a young woman who flees the island she called home because of a murder. The siblings try to piece together the truth of their mother’s life, even as their own relationship is at stake.

After taking a night time holiday lights tour in Boston, we were gifted gold-dusted hot chocolate bombs. It was some of the best hot chocolate I’ve had, and I’m hoping I can find a recipe to replicate it. Mashed promises that this recipe only takes 20 minutes, so I’m hoping it’s a match.

When Joan was 10, her mother moved her and her younger sister away from her violent father. They went back to her grandmother’s house in Memphis, a house that was built by Joan’s grandfather who was lynched shortly after becoming a detective in Memphis. There’s a history of violence surrounding Joan’s family, which is explored in this multi-generational novel. The narrative shifts back and forth through 70 years to show the trials of Joan’s matrilineal family, and how she tries to express this generational trauma through art.

This book starts in the 1600s with a discovery made by Robert Hooke and Antonie van Leeuwenhoek. What they saw when they looked in their microscopes would go on to be called “cells,” the idea of which would change the field of science forever. By looking at living organisms as being comprised of tiny, self-contained cells, we’ve been able to understand human bodies and come up with advanced treatments. Pulitzer Prize-winning Mukherjee writes of complex science terms clearly and in an engaging way as he details this turning point in biology.

Kiara and her brother Marcus have dropped out of high school and their family has been torn a part by tragedy, so she works to take care of them and the nine-year-old boy next door who was abandoned by his parents. When she discovers the dark world of night crawling as a way to make money, she jumps at what seems to her like a good opportunity. But with it comes involvement in a huge scandal involving the Oakland Police Department.

In 1912, an exiled 18-year-old enters the Canadian wilderness and hears a violin being played. A couple hundred years later, an author goes on tour to promote a book that has a strange passage about a man playing a violin as a forest rises around him. Then there’s the detective who is sent to investigate something strange happening in the North American wilderness involving an exiled earl driven to madness and a writer away from home…Metaphysics, time travel, and a particular set of violin notes all converge in this imaginative novel.

I was looking at Kwanzaa recipes when I came across this bad boy. I don’t celebrate the holiday, but wouldn’t be opposed to it. I was just looking out of curiosity when realized that a lot of the recipes are just ones that are usually made in Black American homes for special occasions, which makes sense. Seeing the coconut cake recipe took me back! I swear I can almost taste the fresh coconut shreds. This one is given a bit of a special kick by adding vanilla and almond extract.

I read this super long ago, but still remember liking the magic system. Most of the magic in fantasy I’d read before this book was more overt, while the magic here was more subtle. Intuitive, even.

In it, Brian has a natural connection to the natural world around him that results in him having abilities and knowledge that others don’t. This isolates him until the wizard Od requests him to be her gardener. There’s a power inside Brian that he isn’t yet aware of — one that Od knows could threaten the oppressive rule of the kingdom.

This one was a more recent read, but still more than five years ago. I’ve been a fan of Locke ever since. Here, Caren is busy with the duties of her job managing the historic Belle Vie plantation house in Louisiana when the gardener tells her he’s found the body of a young woman. What follows is Caren realizing she doesn’t know as much as she thought she did about the other people who work there, or the history of Belle Vie.

I read this around 2018, but am just realizing it’s a retelling of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest.” So I guess if you’re familiar with that, you may recognize the structure of the story. It was all new (and glorious) for me, though.

George and Cocoa’s relationship are the focal point of this story, and each chapter changes perspective so we have complete depictions of who they are as people — their past and present. Cocoa brings George to meet her family — Abigail and the titular Mama Day, who is the last in the family to have the magic touch — off the Georgia coast. There was so much in this book that was pleasantly familiar to me, but make no mistake, it will have you sobbing at the end.

This is another one that’ll have you messed up. The writing is so imaginative and beautiful, with fantastical elements strewn throughout. It’s also about the worst humanity has to offer, and is shown through the perspective of a death row inmate. He keeps to himself, reading and imagining the prison violence all around him as something more magical. When an investigator visits the prison to save a man who is about to be executed, the man’s past comes to light, revealing just how easily one can go from victim to perpetrator. This rec comes with all the content warnings if you hadn’t already guessed.

This is one that The New York Times, The Washing Post, and Amazon all say was one of the bests of the year. It’s also an Oprah Book Club pick and a book I already mentioned as a most-anticipated read for this fall. Well, I still haven’t read it, but I just might need to bump it up the list a bit.

It’s a retelling of David Copperfield, but with its critique of poverty, it feels like more somehow? Charles Dickens’ inspiration for David Copperfield was his own experiences with poverty as a child in England, and here, Kingsolver writes about a boy who grows up in the United States’ Appalachia. He’s the son of a single mother and survives foster care, bad schools, addictions, and other traumas endemic in poor, forgotten areas.

The NYT and Barnes & Noble both have this book on their lists. In it, science journalist Yong paints a vivid picture of all that can be sensed in the world. Turtles can outline the Earth’s magnetic fields, giant squids see sparkling whales, plants hold the songs of courting insects, and there are even humans who use sonar like bats. I love books that show how rewarding it is to step outside of our own, singular experiences as humans. This is definitely on my list.

Trust appears on The NYT’s, The Washington Post’s, and was even long listed for this year’s Booker Prize. Diaz was also a finalist for the Pulitzer for fiction and other awards. Suffice to say, my mans can write, and his latest is a layered story. There’s a book titled Bonds that tells a seemingly fictionalized story of a couple rising to wealth and status in the ’20s. But the main character of the novel has a lot in common with the real world (real world in the book, that is. Layers!) investor Andrew Bevel. If the novel was based off of a real person, are the rumors of how they got their money true? And did the mental health of the tycoon’s wife really decline? Now, one woman sets out to discern fact from fiction.

The NYT and WaPo both have this one on their lists. Hsu writes of the friendship he had in college with Japanese American Ken. He and Ken became close friends despite their seemingly immense differences — Ken was mainstream while Hsu was more of a rebel. Their friendship came to an abrupt end when Ken was killed during a carjacking only a couple years after they met. Stay True is a tribute to this relationship — it’s about coming of age as an outsider and finding where you belong.